As an illustration of the state of the times, I give the following verse from one of the songs which Franklin wrote, and which he was accustomed to sing with great applause. At the meetings of the Junto, all the club joined in the chorus,
“Fair Venus calls; her voice obey
In beauty’s arms spend night and day.
The joys of love all joys excel,
And loving’s certainly doing well.
Chorus.
Oh! no!
Not so!
For honest souls still know
Friends and the bottle still bear the bell.”
“It is well,” Mr. Parton writes, “for us, in these days, to consider the spectacle of this large, robust soul, sporting in this simple, homely way. This superb Franklin of ours, who spent some evenings in mere jollity, passed nearly all his days in labor most fruitful of benefit to his country.”—Life of Franklin, Vol. i, p. 262.
[24] It may be worthy of record, that Wedderburn became the hero of the clubs and the favorite of the Tory party. Wealth and honors were lavished upon him. He rose to the dignity of an earl and lord chancellor, and yet we do not find, in any of the annals of those days, that he is spoken of otherwise than as a shallow, unprincipled man. When his death, after a few hours’ illness, was announced to the king, he scornfully said, “He has not left a worse man behind him.”
[25] “And here perhaps we have one of the reasons why Dr. Franklin, who was universally confessed to be the ablest pen in America, was not always asked to write the great documents of the Revolution. He would have put a joke into the Declaration of Independence, if it had fallen to him to write it. At this time he was a humorist of fifty years standing, and had become fixed in the habit of illustrating great truths by grotesque and familiar similes. His jokes, the circulating medium of Congress, were as helpful to the cause, as Jay’s conscience or Adams’ fire; they restored good humor, and relieved the tedium of delay, but were out of place in formal, exact and authoritative papers.”—Parton’s Franklin, Vol. 2. p. 85.
[26] Upon the overthrow of the royalist cause, Governor Franklin with other Tories went to England. Government gave him outright eighteen hundred pounds, and settled upon him a pension of eight hundred pounds a year. After the lapse of ten years he sought reconciliation with with his father. He lived to the age of eighty-two and died in London, in 1813.
[27] In the year 1780, Mr. Henry Laurens, formerly President of Congress, was sent as ambassador to Holland. The ship was captured off Newfoundland, after a chase of five hours. The unfortunate man was thrown into the Tower, where he was imprisoned fifteen months, “where” he wrote to Mr. Burke, “I suffered under a degree of rigor, almost if not altogether unexampled in modern British history.”
[28] This anecdote has had a wide circulation in the newspapers. Mr. William Cobbett inserts it in his “Works,” with the following comment, characteristic of the spirit of most of the higher class of Englishmen, in those days: